CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 71

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Long-Run Effects of Parental Homeownership and Housing Quality on Later Life Outcomes
  

  August 2026

  Authors: John Voorheis, Garret Christensen

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-54

  We measure the effects of housing quality and living in renter- versus owner-occupied housing as a child on later life outcomes. Homeownership is the primary source of most US households' wealth, and homeownership and housing quality potentially have large impacts on children, yet we know relatively little about any long-term effects. Ownership and housing quality are correlated with income, neighborhood characteristics, and many other socioeconomic characteristics, making causal estimation difficult. Using the US Census Bureau's data linkage infrastructure, we create a new data linkage between the American Housing Survey (1995-2002) and administrative tax data (2016-2019), to investigate adult outcomes such as earnings and having a mortgage or owning a home, while comprehensively controlling for a wide variety of variables, including housing quality. We find strong positive correlations with growing up in a parent-owned home, approximately $2,000 higher incomes and a 6 percentage point increased likelihood of ownership. However, we find no evidence of causal effects: unobservables that are significantly less correlated with outcome and treatment than observables would drive the coefficients of interest to zero, and family fixed effects models that compare siblings to each other show no effect of years of childhood spent in an owned home or being born into an owned home.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Distribution and Consequences of Natural Disasters: Evidence From U.S. Wildfire Victims
  

  August 2026

  Authors: John Voorheis, Jonathan Colmer, Patrick Baylis, Judson Boomhower

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-53

  The economic burden of natural disasters is shaped by who is exposed, who experiences losses, how those losses alter individual economic trajectories, and how affected communities evolve in the aftermath. We link property-level damage data from over 100 U.S. wildfires to administrative tax and Census data to understand individual level relationships between disaster damage and economic outcomes. Residents of burned areas are wealthier than the U.S. population on average, but within these wildfire perimeters the likelihood that a home burns is negatively correlated with pre-fire income. Home destruction imposes costs beyond rebuilding the property: occupants of destroyed homes experience lower income for three years post-fire, producing cumulative income losses equal to 26 percent of pre-fire annual income. We do not detect income or employment effects for residents without direct property damage. Community recovery is slow and accompanied by changes in composition. Four years after a fire, half of destroyed addresses remain unoccupied and reoccupied addresses house residents with substantially higher incomes than before.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Flood Risk, Insurance, and Housing in the United States
  

  June 2026

  Authors: John Voorheis, Suvy Qin

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-37

  Flooding is among the most salient natural hazards facing households in the United States. A large body of evidence has documented a pattern of disproportionate social vulnerability in floodplains. However, little evidence exists on how household-level exposure to flood risk is distributed. We fill this gap by combining parcel-level flood risk with confidential linked survey and administrative data held at the US Census Bureau. Although net migration to Census blocks in floodplains has increased in recent years, there has been essentially no net migration to parcels with flood risk or change in the overall share of households living in floodplains. Income gradients in flood risk are highly non-linear at the household level, with slightly negative income gradients for the bottom 90 percentiles of the income distribution that are dwarfed by disproportionate exposure in the top decile, especially when considering multiple property ownership. This nonlinearity is largely driven by differences in building type and homeownership within narrow income groups. In contrast to the conclusions in the literature using aggregate data, our household-level analysis suggests that households in floodplains are less disadvantaged and increasingly protected from the impacts of flooding, even as a vulnerable subpopulation of low-income, uninsured homeowners remains.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Remote Work and Residential Sorting: IV Evidence From Expiring Office Leases
  

  June 2026

  Authors: Richard De Thorpe

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-34

  How has remote work reshaped residential sorting and housing demand, and what are the implications for state and local governments? To estimate causal effects, I propose a novel instrument for remote work that exploits quasi-random variation in the timing and size of office lease expirations, captured through a Bartik-style exposure measure at the residential block level. Expirations allow tenant firms to reduce office space and switch employees to remote work, generating strong first-stage effects. Remote work causes modest increases in housing and property tax expenditures in exchange for space, homeownership, and public schools, but not other neighborhood characteristics. It significantly increases migration, particularly out of cities and states that levy income taxes. At the neighborhood level, higher 2020 remote work shares cause subsequent residential turnover, demographic clustering, and property tax revenue windfalls. Taken together, the results indicate that remote work induces migration consistent with Tiebout sorting, and accounts for 10% of migration since 2020. Residential choices and tax bases now depend less on employment proximity and more on affordability and tax-benefit linkage.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Lands of Opportunity: Differences in the Geography of Wealth and Income Mobility in the United States
  

  May 2026

  Authors: John Voorheis, Ariel J. Binder, Max Risch

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-30

  We provide new county-level estimates of intergenerational mobility, covering multiple economic concepts: total income, labor income, homeownership, housing wealth, and total wealth. This is possible via small-area estimation techniques and linked survey and administrative data covering millions of U.S. children born between 1978 and 1986. We find that relative mobility in wealth concepts shows less spatial clustering and more spatial variation than relative mobility in income concepts. Many cities and their suburbs exhibit lower relative mobility (i.e. higher intergenerational persistence) in wealth concepts than in income concepts. Next, we show that various local characteristics are associated with some concepts of economic mobility but not with others. For example, we estimate a strong negative association between the local severity of the Great Recession and child income, regardless of parent position in the income distribution. However, the negative association between recession severity and wealth only exists among children from poorer families. We provide a public-use data package on census.gov to facilitate further research.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Status Inconsistency and Geographic Mobility in the United States
  

  March 2026

  Authors: Shih-Keng Yen, Ernesto F. L. Amaral

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-20

  This study examines how neighborhood status and individual status jointly shape geographic mobility in the United States. Drawing on restricted-use American Community Survey data, we conceptualize neighborhood status as the relative standing of a census tract's median family income compared to demographically similar reference neighborhoods, and individual status as a household's relative income rank within its tract. Building on comparison theory and status inconsistency perspectives, we test whether mismatches between neighborhood and individual status influence short-distance (within-county) and long-distance (between-county) mobility. Multinomial logistic models reveal that disadvantaged neighborhood status increases within-county mobility, particularly when paired with high individual status, supporting spatial assimilation arguments. Conversely, low individual status in high-status neighborhoods heightens mobility, consistent with relative deprivation theory rather than status signaling. Results suggest that status inconsistency plays a central role in residential decision-making and that neighborhood status primarily affects short-distance mobility. The findings advance research on stratification and internal migration by integrating relative contextual and positional mechanisms.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Neighborhood Racial Status and White Out-Mobility
  

  March 2026

  Authors: Shih-Keng Yen, Ernesto F. L. Amaral

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-26-19

  Drawing on American Community Survey data, this study examines how whites' relative socioeconomic standing vis-'-vis nonwhite neighbors affects the association between minority presence and white out-mobility. Moving beyond the racial preferences versus racial proxy debate, we integrate group competition and contact theories with status theory to conceptualize 'racial status' as whites' first-order income rank relative to the subgroup status of Black, Hispanic, and Asian residents at the census tract level. Multilevel linear probability models show that whites lacking advantaged status are generally more likely to move. However, the positive association between Black or Asian concentration and white departure is weaker among status-disadvantaged whites, while the negative association with Hispanic concentration is stronger. These patterns lend greater support to contact theory than to group competition theory. By foregrounding relative status, the study demonstrates that racial and socioeconomic mechanisms are intertwined in shaping white residential mobility.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Housing Capital and Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
  

  August 2025

  Authors: John Voorheis, Ariel J. Binder, Max Risch

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-25-55

  Housing represents the most important capital asset for most U.S. families. Despite substantial analysis of the intergenerational mobility of income, large gaps in our knowledge of the distribution of housing assets and their transmission over time remain, as housing is generally not reflected by income flows. Using novel linked data that combines survey responses with administrative tax data and information on ownership and valuation from property tax records for over 3.4 million families, we provide new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of housing capital. We find that housing capital is more persistent across generations than labor income. We document important disparities between average housing outcomes for White and Black children. These difference persist even conditional on parent rank in the distribution of housing assets, with the gap growing throughout the parental housing capital distribution. A decomposition shows that average differences in children's labor market outcomes associated with parental assets explain about half of the observed intergenerational persistence (a 'labor income channel'), and that there is also a substantial 'direct channel' ' conditional on children having the same earnings, children of parents with more housing assets have more assets themselves on average. The direct channel is also important for explaining the intergenerational gap in outcomes of Black and White children. Finally, we present quasi-experimental evidence that local housing supply constraints help explain spatial differences in intergenerational persistence across US counties. Our results establish the importance of housing markets, both independently from and jointly with labor markets, in shaping the intergenerational persistence of economic resources.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Effects of Eviction on Children
  

  May 2025

  Authors: Daniel Tannenbaum, Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Winnie van Dijk, Deniz Dutz

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-25-34

  Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement, and high school completion by assembling new data sets linking eviction court records in Chicago and New York to administrative public school records and restricted Census records. To disentangle the consequences of eviction from the effects of correlated sources of economic distress, we use a research design based on the random assignment of court cases to judges who vary in their leniency. We find that eviction increases children's residential mobility, homelessness, and likelihood of doubling up with grandparents or other adults. Eviction also disrupts school engagement, causing increased absences and school changes. While we find little impact on elementary and middle school test scores, eviction substantially reduces high school course credits. Lastly, we find that eviction reduces high school graduation and use a novel bounding method to show that this finding is not driven by differential attrition. The disruptive effects of eviction appear worse for older children and boys. Our evidence suggests that the impact of eviction on children runs through the disruption to the home environment or school engagement rather than deterioration in school or neighborhood quality, and may be moderated by access to family support networks.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Geographic Immobility in the United States: Assessing the Prevalence and Characteristics of Those Who Never Migrate Across State Lines Using Linked Federal Tax Microdata
  

  March 2025

  Authors: Thomas B. Foster, Mark Ellis, Lee Fiorio

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-25-19

  This paper explores the prevalence and characteristics of those who never migrate at the state scale in the U.S. Studying people who never migrate requires regular and frequent observation of their residential location for a lifetime, or at least for many years. A novel U.S. population-sized longitudinal dataset that links individual level Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative records supplies this information annually, along with information on income and socio-demographic characteristics. We use these administrative microdata to follow a cohort aged between 15 and 50 in 2001 from 2001 to 2016, differentiating those who lived in the same state every year during this period (i.e., never made an interstate move) from those who lived in more than one state (i.e., made at least one interstate move). We find those who never made an interstate move comprised 75 percent of the total population of this age cohort. This percentage varies by year of age but never falls below 62 percent even for those who were teenagers or young adults in 2001. There are also variations in these percentages by sex, race, nativity, and income, with the latter having the largest effects. We also find substantial variation in these percentages across states. Our findings suggest a need for more research on geographically immobile populations in U.S.
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